See my vCard for contact details

Social media provides us with a means of reaching out and interacting with a huge number of people that only a few years ago would have been practically impossible. But with the ever increasing number of social media sites we are on, for most of us it has become a nightmare to keep track of our profiles or even to decide which of our profiles would be the best to give out as our main point of contact.

The easy solution would be to create our own site and just add all our social media links on it and use that as our online contact card. Unfortunately not everyone has the web design skills to go about implenting their own site. This is where the Card.ly comes in very handy, it provides a very easy interface where people can easily add their online profiles, pick a theme and create a good-looking online mini business card of their own in just a couple of minutes. They are then able to share this out to the world through a very easy to remember URL – http://www.card.ly/yourname .

There are nearly 30 odd themes you can choose from for your contact card, most of which are free, though personally only found 5 or 6 that are visually pleasing (yeah I am a picky old SOD).  Some of the themes also have a stream tab, that pulls in your twitter and RSS feeds to display within your contact card, unfortunately the stream overflows the design borders, so I would not recommend going with this option atelast until they get better themes. What I really like about Card.ly is that it creates an online contact card that is hCard compliant and anyone can easily download your vCard by clicking the an icon under the title.

Card.ly also provides a widget that you can embed in your blogs/websites e.t.c to link to your online busines card. You could also pay $24.99 a year for the premium version which has a extra goodies like more themes to choose from, unlimited RSS streams, usage stats and advertisement-free cards.

Below is a screenshot of my Card.ly profile - http://www.card.ly/niroism

Screenshot of my Card.ly contact card